The Horse Whisperer (50 page)

“Where’s Ed? Isn’t he jumping with you all?”

“He gets in later today.’”

“I thought it’d been a tad too peaceful. You tell him hi from me”.

“I’ll do that”.

He walked along Front Street toward North Higgins, hugging the shade where he could find it. It felt good to be back in Missoula. It was an easygoing place where you could be what you were without others rushing to judge you. Much of the laid-back atmosphere flowed from the university across the river. The town was always full of students, even now, with the summer vacation already under way. And sometimes this made Connor feel like an outsider, reviving in him a twinge, more of regret than of envy, that he’d never gone to college himself.

In recent years the town had become a magnet for those who were tired of city life but weren’t yet ready for the log cabin and hauling water from the creek. In Missoula they found the perfect balance. They could be in the mountains in minutes and still have at hand all those truly crucial things in life—like shopping malls, the latest Hollywood movies and a good cappuccino. Living alongside them were the environmentalists: from full-blooded eco-warriors who ate loggers for breakfast to more mild-mannered bunnyhuggers, hippies and assorted hangers-on who, at the drop of a recycled paper hat, would hug almost anything and anyone. Then there were the culture-vultures and counterculture-vultures, musicians, painters, sculptors and writers of every description. Ed, always a fountain of useless but often intriguing information, claimed there were more writers per acre in Missoula than in any other place on the planet.

The darkroom Connor used was tucked among some garages in a backstreet off North Higgins. It was one narrow
room with a studio at one end and the darkroom area boxed off at the other. There were drapes along one wall and rolls of different-colored paper that could be lowered to make backgrounds for portraits.

The place belonged to a photographer called Trudy Barratt who worked mostly for
The Missoulian
, the local newspaper. She and Connor had met two summers ago when the paper used some of his forest fire pictures and they’d started an affair that lasted the rest of the summer. It faded in the fall when he went back over the mountains, as he always did, to spend the winter on the ranch. But the two of them had remained friends. Trudy had helped get him commissions and given him a key to the studio so that he could use it whenever he liked.

Connor let himself in and switched on the lights. The air was hot and dank and smelled of chemicals and he left the door open until he’d gotten the air-conditioning going. He took down a set of wedding prints that Trudy had hung up to dry and laid them carefully on the worktop. There was one among them that Connor knew was destined for what she called her “whoops album”: pictures her clients wouldn’t want to see. In this one the bridegroom was kissing one of the bridesmaids in a way that didn’t seem to impress the bride one little bit. It was an image that might prove useful come the divorce.

When everything was ready, Connor shut the door, turned out the main lights and took the two rolls of film from his pocket. He worked carefully, taking his time. He had always enjoyed this part of photography. The womblike intimacy, the aloneness, the ghostly red of the safe light that somehow suspended time.

He had taken pictures ever since he was a child. His father had given him a used Pentax SLR for his ninth birthday and later helped him rig up a darkroom in a corner of the barn. In those days Connor liked to take pictures of animals and when he Was twelve, one he’d taken of a black bear standing on its hind legs in the creek won a competition in a wildlife magazine. In his late teens and early twenties he made a few dollars here and there selling skiing and climbing pictures to one or two magazines who liked his work. But it was smoke jumping that gave him his first big break.

It had happened three years ago, his and Ed’s rookie season and as fine a baptism as any jumper ever had. It turned into one of the driest summers on record and forest fires became big news all over the country, especially the ones sweeping through Yellowstone Park. Connor always took a camera with him—nothing special, just a cheap pocket snapper. And one day, almost by accident, he took this breathtaking picture of Ed, alone on a ridge, swinging his pulaski, silhouetted against a wall of flames that must have been two hundred feet tall.

Trudy Barratt had put him in touch with a photo agency in New York and the picture was printed on the front page of
The New York Times
and in newspapers and magazines all over the world. It earned Connor more money than he’d ever seen and with it he paid off all the debts that had accumulated on the ranch and still had enough to buy himself some new cameras and lenses.
The Missoulian
ran a feature piece about his success with a picture of him looking absurdly glamorous in his smoke jumping gear, which earned him much ribbing from every other jumper on the base. He even got a couple of fan letters which made Ed jealous as hell. Back in Boston that fall, Ed had the Yellowstone photograph of his silhouette blown up five feet wide and hung it on his wall. He claimed it worked wonders for his love life.

The two of them had met a few years earlier when Ed was a freshman at the university in Missoula and Connor was wondering if he was going to be ranch hand all his life. Every summer, throughout the West, the Forest Service took on casual “pounders” to fight backcountry fires. Pounding was a lot less glamorous than smoke jumping but you had to do it for several seasons before you could even apply to be a jumper. It wasn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect summer-vacation job. The young men and women whom it attracted came from many different backgrounds. But whether for the rest of the year they were cowhands, students or ski bums, they all had that same itch to find something with a little more adventure than washing dishes or waiting tables.

Connor and Ed had found themselves side by side, cutting line on the same crew, and Connor, who already had a season of pounding under his belt, had gone along with the tradition of giving the college-kid rookies a hard time.

In the macho world of firefighting Edward Cavendish Tully was an easy target. He was from a wealthy family in Lexington, Kentucky, and was studying music and, at first, for both these facts, along with his slight southern drawl, the round gold-rimmed spectacles and aristocratic good looks, he was mercilessly teased. But he was as fit and tough as the best of them and took the taunts with such good humor that soon he was liked by the whole crew.

Connor was even more impressed when he found out that since the age of six, Ed had been diabetic and needed to inject himself with insulin before every meal. On top of all this, it turned out that this classical music scholar also played lead guitar in a college band and could do more than passable impressions of anyone from Van Halen to Hendrix. Getting to know him taught Connor the fallacy of judging people by their background or wealth or whatever other label happened to hang around their necks.

It was a classic attraction of opposites: Ed the extrovert intellectual, always ready with a joke or a story or an opinion on anything and Connor the level, laconic one. Connor wasn’t a great one for analyzing these things, but he recalled Trudy Barratt once saying that he and Ed each had those traits that the other lacked and aspired to and that if you could forge one person from the two of them, the result would be a really great guy. Connor wondered if that was supposed to be a compliment and concluded that it probably wasn’t.

What they undoubtedly did share was a passion for the outdoors. On their days off they would go climbing or flyfishing or canoeing. The fires they fought that first summer forged a deep and durable friendship. They even invented their own private ritual. It came about when they were cutting line one day and the wind changed and the fire blew up and they suddenly found themselves, just the two of them, surrounded by flame.

“Hey, man!” Ed called. “We’re in the heart of the fire!”

And for some weird reason, without any kind of rehearsal, they had both put their clenched fists to their chests and solemnly declaimed “Hearts of fire!” and then given each other a high-five. It was only a kind of mock macho joke and they
laughed about it afterward. But they’d done it ever since before every fire they’d fought.

Connor had other friends, of course, mostly around Augusta and Choteau and a few in Great Falls, kids he’d grown up with and been with at high school. Then there were his climbing and skiing buddies and one or two other firefighters he met up with from time to time. But there wasn’t one among them he could call close. As an only child he’d always been something of a loner. His mother used to call him The Watcher. Once, only half joking, she’d said that he was happier looking at life through a camera than actually living it. The truth was, Ed was the only real friend he’d ever had.

After he graduated, Ed had moved back east, to grad school in Boston, where he’d stayed ever since. Yet every summer he still somehow managed to come back to Montana and the two of them would spend some months together, fighting fires and having fun. Ed loved to help out on the ranch. It was only a small spread and since Connor’s father died, mother and son had had to handle pretty much everything on their own. It was the main reason Connor had never gone to college.

Ed’s family raised thoroughbreds and he would tease Connor’s mother about the ranch horses, telling her how slow and clunky they were and why didn’t she go to Kentucky and get herself something half decent. She would pretend to be cross but it was clear she adored him. She had once even referred to him as her second son. The only thing she had never been able to understand was what possessed him and Connor, two otherwise seemingly sane young men, to make them want to spend their summers putting out fires. Connor could remember the evening when they’d told her over supper that they were going to sign on as smoke jumpers.

“We’re going to be Zoolies, Ma”.

“What in heck’s name is a Zoolie?”

“A Missoula smoke jumper, Mrs. Ford,” Ed said. “They’re as cool as it gets. Even cooler than being a hotshot”.

“Oh, really. And what’s the heck’s a hotshot when it’s at home?”

“They’re ground firefighters, Mrs. Ford. They’re like the marines or something, I guess. Or think they are. Hotshots
think they’re cool and are always boasting about it. Whereas smoke jumpers really are cool and don’t need to”.

“There’s only four hundred smoke jumpers in the whole country,” Connor said.

“There’s that many idiots, huh?” she said. “Let me get this straight. You get to go up high in a little airplane, you find a fire and then you jump out and land in it. Is that the idea?”

“Ma, they do give you a parachute,” Connor said.

“Oh, well. That’s okay then. You boys must be out of your minds”.

Ed frowned. “Mrs. Ford? I forgot. How many years was it you rode rodeo?”

“That’s totally different”.

“Yeah,” Connor said. “In rodeo you don’t get a parachute”.

As it turned out, Ed had something of a struggle persuading those in charge of selection at the Missoula base that his diabetes wasn’t going to be a problem. But he excelled himself in training and with the help of a compliant doctor (a close family friend who didn’t quite lie but didn’t quite tell the truth either), managed to persuade them that his condition would in no way interfere with his ability to do the job. By now they were more than glad to have him.

Back in February, Ed had called to tell Connor about this new girlfriend he’d started dating. The guy clearly had it bad. Over the years there had been a number of girlfriends (mostly Ed’s) and one or two had even lasted more than one summer. Last year Connor had been heavily involved with a six-foottall hockey champ from Seattle by the name of Gloria McGrath whom Ed had nicknamed Darth. When these affairs happened, the two men happily gave each other space. Ed was a congenital romantic, forever falling in love and declaring every time that this, hand on heart, was the one. Nevertheless, listening to him going on and on about her over the phone, Connor had gotten the distinct impression that this Julia woman actually might be the one.

“You remember Natalie Wood in
West Side Story?”

“No”.

“Connor, really, sometimes, man, I despair of you. It’s a
classic. You must have seen it on TV—you know, that little square thing that stands in the corner of the room?”

“So, she’s beautiful”.

“Yeah, but you know how some beautiful women know how beautiful they are? Well, Julia doesn’t. She’s totally natural. And you know what? She likes to climb, she can ski like a dream. She’s smart, funny, artistic—”

“Doesn’t the halo get in the way?”

“No, the wings do a little but they’re kind of sexy. I tell you, man. This is it. I want to have her babies”.

“I don’t think it works that way around”.

It was quite a buildup. Connor was looking forward to meeting her.

Both of the rolls of film that he was processing now were black and white. He often shot color too, especially when he’d been commissioned, but when he was shooting for himself he usually preferred black and white. The shots he’d taken of the old man teaching the girl to cast were a washout. There were one or two others on the contact sheet that were perhaps worth printing but he wasn’t going to bother now. He was too interested in the other roll, the one he’d shot on Iron Mountain. In truth, he was really interested in only one frame of it.

His heart had beaten a little faster as soon as he held the negative up to the light and saw that it was there. He didn’t even look at the other shots. The moment the negative was dry enough he had gone straight for a ten-by-eight print. It was in the tray now and as he rocked it, letting the developer swill slowly to and fro across the paper, he could see the elk starting to appear, as if through a haze of smoke, just as it had on the mountain.

In that fraction of a moment when he had taken the picture, the animal had lifted its head and turned it to a threequarter profile and in so doing had sent the flames leaping from its antlers in a furious jagged swirl.